I am venturing back into more active trading after having been away for several years. Was doing a bunch of reading over the weekend and looking for data/news/charting services. Anyways I fell down a Bloomberg rabbit hole when I saw that between JPM and BoA they were spending $168,000,000 on Bloomberg terminal leases. I have never had, used or even seen a terminal in person. It made me curious if anybody here had ever used one and what their value proposition was to charge $24,000 per machine per year. I saw mentioned again and again the value of the bloomberg messenger system but still think that seems like a stretch. If you have ever run one was it worth what they charge?Do you get information faster/actionable that you can't get anywhere else.
Without a Bloomberg terminal...you can't get access to "The Cartel" chat groups for rigging the markets. Seriously, if you're not working for a financial institution or sharing a terminal in a professional trading group...I don't see any use for a Bloomberg terminal for an individual retail trader. wrbtrader
I've only ever used BB in a professional context. I would never justify using one on a retail account. Part of the attraction, honestly, is that you're not anybody in finance if you aren't on BB. So it's a signalling mechanism ("I am so important that the bank is going to spend 2 grand a month on something I don't really need") like having an unncessarily large number of monitors. In my first job (investment bank trader) I had BB and Reuters (and 6 monitors). An edict came down from on high that we had to pick one as a cost saving exercise. The traders screamed blue murder, and eventually it was decided that certain teams would be exempt. It came down that something like 100% of the traders were exempt and got to keep both. It was sort of useful, but 95% of the time we were working off our own pricing curves and surfaces, and we weren't even trading through it (everything was voice broked back then in the dinosaur age). In my hedge fund job I had BB but didn't really use it. It was sort of useful for a quick correlation study, or to get data on something new, but for anything more serious we'd be using in house data (some of which, ultimately, would be coming from B-PIPE) and our own backtesting software. The excecution traders used it for manual trades on OTC stuff through chat and some point and click trading API that were only available on BB. GAT
I have seen and played with it a while back. Retail has to need or use for it. It is the quality of data, the speed of info getting there, overall acceptance and the breadth of markers.
If a company has one Bloomberg terminal then you can have an unlimited number of Bloomberg messenger accounts for $10 a month per user.
bloomberg terminal is for financial institutions across the spectrum, many features that a retail trader would never use or even know what it does.
bloomberg excel add in is neat but for the most part it’s a status symbol getting your own terminal is akin to getting promoted
Can't live without it in the institutional/professional community. For some products it's the only source - especially if you trade multiple markets in multiple countries.
Thanks for the replies. I had no intention of getting one for myself. What blew me away was what JPM and BOA paid for their terminals and that they didn't get much or any of a discount. I knew they were expensive I just always assumed that once you need 100 or 1000 you would get a big discount.
I find it necessary for certain data/access that I can’t get elsewhere, but in most cases it’s probably possible to find less quality alternative sources elsewhere. Personally I think it pays for itself- but that depends on the value-add you can monetize from it.